"I don't know," said John, with a certain frolicking quality in his voice; "I'm trying to find out."
"What was that you were playing a while ago?" I asked. "The slow, peaceful, sad sort of thing."
"This?" And he whistled a few bars.
I nodded.
"I made it up as I went along," he said; "music's like a language. When a man's heard a lot of the words and the idioms he can make a bluff at talking it; but I can only speak a few words. I've only got a child's vocabulary. I can only say, 'I'm hungry,' or 'I'm sleepy,' or 'I want a set of carpenter's tools,' or 'Brown swiped my tennis bat and I'm going to punch his head,' or 'The little girl over the fence has bright blue eyes and throws a ball like a boy and climbs trees.'"
He had to laugh himself at the idea of being able to express such things in musical terms, but when he had sponged up a long glass of very darkly mixed Bourbon and Apollinaris, the picture of the little girl over the fence must have been still in his mind, for having left us abruptly for the piano, he preluded and then began to improvise upon that theme. He talked rather than sang, but always in tune and with the clearest enunciation, and any amount of experience.
He began merrily, and in no time had us both laughing; I think the first air which he tortured to fit his unrhymed and unrhythmical words belonged once to Mozart, but I am not sure. It was made out of merriness, sunshine, and dew.
"The little girl over the fence, the fence
Has bri-i-i-ight blue-ooo eyes
And throws a ball like a boy, a boy,
And cli-i-i-i-i-i-imbs trees."
He repeated in the minor, modulated into a more solemn key, and once more talked off the words. He left you with a slight feeling of anxiety. You began to be afraid that the little girl would fall out of the trees and hurt herself. But no, instead he grabbed something by the hair right out of a Beethoven adagio, and began to want that little girl with the blue eyes as a little girl with blue eyes has seldom been wanted before; she became Psyche, Trojan Helen, a lover's dream; all that is most exquisite and to be desired in the world—and then suddenly he lost all hope of her and borrowed from Palestrina to tell about it, and the last time she climbed trees it was plump on up into Heaven that she climbed, and from hell below, or pretty close to it, there arose the words "And climb trees" like a solemn ecclesiastical amen.
It was an astounding performance, almost demoniac in its cleverness and in its power to move the hearer.